Favre Backup club- Excellent article in Times

Sometimes I cant believe he's actually the QB of my team. Great article,cool guy, great leader and teamate


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/sports/football/10favre.html?hp



They arrived in Green Bay a cast of characters, 18 men who played quarterback for the Packers during a 17-season stretch when few of them played at all.

Jim McMahon arrived as a Super Bowl champion, Ty Detmer as a Heisman Trophy winner. Rick Mirer was a first-round disappointment, Matt Hasselbeck a sixth-round find.

Now, they belong to a small football fraternity that started with Don Majkowski and continued to Aaron Rodgers: the Brett Favre Backup Club.

Majkowski watches games now in retirement, and he sees pieces of Favre all over the league. The same ball fakes. The same hop after firing a pass. The way so many of them undo their chinstraps after each play.

“His idiosyncrasies are everywhere,” Majkowski said. “If you closed your eyes and just listened to a Packers game, you can hear the cadence. Aaron Rodgers sounds exactly like Brett. He’s not alone. Those dudes are doing everything that Brett did.”

Eleven of the 18 members later started for other teams. But first, each apprenticed under Favre, a job that was part stagehand and part understudy. Looking back, it was part of history, too.

Beyond the tics they carried with them, enduring images of Favre remain. They are snapshots frozen in time that, when taken together, present the picture of a quarterback from the vantage point of those who spent the most time around him.

They remember Favre as a young man, “a knucklehead,” Majkowski said. Favre would show up at meetings wearing shorts but no shoes. He would lean back in a chair and place his bare feet on the table. Coach Mike Holmgren, ever the perfectionist, would point at Favre and look at Majkowski.

“Like, can you believe this hick?” Majkowski said.

Those were the wild times. The parties after games at Majkowski’s house. The college atmosphere. The plays that broke down, only to end with touchdown passes. “No-no-no-no-no-yes!” plays is what Holmgren called them.

“But you could see all the signs when I was with him of how great he could be,” said Kurt Warner, a nonmember of the Backup Club who spent training camp with the Packers in 1994.

They remember Favre the practical joker, the veteran who asked them to fetch orange juice and then dumped hot sauce in their cereal, who put fake rats in their lockers or who blew air horns in their ears. One time, Favre even soaked the jersey of his successor, Aaron Rodgers, with doe urine. The smell lasted for months.

Detmer and Favre once had a running contest with the kickers, who put Favre’s helmet in the ice tub for revenge. It was the first year with coach-to-quarterback communication devices in players’ helmets, and Favre’s short-circuited, leading Holmgren to blow his own fuse.

The only backup who confessed to returning fire was Hasselbeck, who once put live worms in Favre’s chewing tobacco.

Favre laughed at that incident, typical of the everyman the backups all remember. When Hasselbeck arrived in 1998, he passed a billboard with Favre’s face every day on the way to practice. At their first meeting, Favre turned to Hasselbeck and said, “Hi, I’m Brett.”

“He introduced himself as if I didn’t know who he was,” Hasselbeck said. “I had this image, from the quarterbacks I had been around, of this QB attitude. Brett was normal. His best friend was the strength coach.”

Favre’s current backup, Jets quarterback Kellen Clemens, said, “He does a good job of not being Brett Favre, if that makes any sense.”

To the backups, it makes perfect sense. Hasselbeck often found Favre alone in the weight room, squatting 315 pounds. Another backup, Saints quarterback Mark Brunell (member, 1993-4), witnessed Favre’s well-documented wildness translating onto the golf course.

Then there was the time when Favre, Brunell and Detmer went hunting in Wisconsin. Favre showed up in blue sweat pants and an orange hunting jacket. When Brunell noticed the shotgun in Favre’s hands, it made him nervous. While walking through the woods, they spotted a deer, and Detmer remembers Favre asking, “Is that a dog?”

Asked if they killed anything, Brunell said, “Just time.”

Over the years, as the backups changed and Favre matured, their stories reveal how he improved in golf and in hunting and, of course, in football. Everything changed, they said, except Favre, who has made 279 consecutive starts, including the postseason.

“He’s the same guy behind the facemask,” said Ingle Martin, a backup in 2006. “The same mannerisms, the same everything.”

None of the backups recommend following Favre’s fundamentals — not the hop backward after throws, not the underhand passes. But when they look at competitiveness and pain tolerance and old-fashioned luck, they find all those attributes in the quarterback who kept them off the field.

Majkowski saw the X-rays after Favre broke the thumb on his throwing hand in 2003. Normally, Majkowski said, that injury would require surgery with screws inserted. Favre never missed a practice.

“It’s the greatest single consecutive starting streak in the history of sports,” Majkowski said. “Unless you played quarterback in the N.F.L., you can’t fully appreciate how difficult it is to go through one season without missing a game, let alone 17.”

Mostly, though, they remember Favre the human being. They remember the stories he told, the John Elway impression he perfected.


He is very much grateful to those people who stuck with him,” Hasselbeck said, noting that coaches in Atlanta gave up on Favre and that coaches in Green Bay almost did. “He has this larger-than-life persona, or image, but at the end of the day, he’s still a human being. Mike Holmgren believed in Brett when a lot of people didn’t. Maybe something similar is happening right now.”

The backups watched Favre’s tearful retirement news conference last spring — “Which press conference?” Brunell joked. “I remember five or six of those” — and all the memories came flooding back. Only Majkowski, who has covered the Packers as an analyst in recent years, believed that Favre would stay retired. He had approached Favre on the field before games. Sometimes, when he asked if Favre was hanging in there, the answer came back, “barely.”

“I knew he wouldn’t,” Hasselbeck said. “I’m not saying he knew, but if you know him, he loves football. There are guys in the N.F.L. who love being in the N.F.L., and there are guys who just love to play football. It’s totally different.”

They listened as analysts criticized Favre for his indecision. They, too, heard stories about the way Favre distanced himself from teammates as he grew older. What struck Steve Bono, a backup in 1997, was when Favre said it was “hard to be Brett.”

“That was the weight that he felt and carried,” Bono said.

Majkowski said: “There is no comparison to the guy at that press conference compared to when I first met him. It’s hard for me to comprehend now that maturity, that he’s old enough to be called Mr. Favre now.”

Favre turns 39 on Friday. Now settled with the Jets, he leads the league in passer rating through five weeks. The backups watch him wearing green and white, and it feels strange — like seeing their collective history, the same old Brett, but all mixed up.

“Honestly, I don’t like it,” Brunell said. “To me, Brett Favre is a Packer. I would have loved if he had finished a Packer. To me, and shoot, to millions of others, he’s going to be considered a Packer.”

The Backup Club will induct three new members at the end of this season, but so far, only Rodgers holds the distinction of replacing the man who always seemed as if he would play forever.

“It’s an honor,” Rodgers said, “to play behind one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, take the reins of a good football team, and try and pick up where he left off.”

 

Back in the early 80's, the NY Post used to have football writers that wrote great articles like this. Today, only the Times has writers like this but they don't cover the NFL enough for my taste. The NY media in general does not cover the NFL enough for me. Have you heard Fatcesca lately, with ED Coleman and Carlin and Jones. Sickening baseball talk. Thank God for Sirius NFL!!!!!!